We've seen it countless times on fire alarms and panic buttons: Break glass in case of emergency. (The example above is from a San Francisco BART station.) It's a fitting figure of speech for a theme in my practice: When a client feels that their company's established processes are too slow or that employees are addressing a situation with insufficient urgency, they "break glass" and intervene to bypass those processes, generate the requisite urgency, and ensure that the issue is resolved now.
The leader who never breaks glass runs the risk of missing out on narrow windows of opportunity and being overtaken by fast-moving threats. Sensing when to break glass and learning how to do so with the right amount of force are essential leadership skills. But the leader who breaks glass incessantly at the first sign of delay causes other problems.
Such knee-jerk reactivity can affect the company's culture and infrastructure. As I've noted before, "[Leaders] generally have a bias for action, and when they’re faced with a system that seems to be slowing things down, they simply ignore it. This can be a great strength--but it can also be a crucial weakness, particularly when a leader’s reflexive disregard for systems prevents their healthy evolution in the organization at large." [1]
It can also affect employees' sense of responsibility and motivation: "When a leader repeatedly continues to intervene...as an organization grows...people are taught that this is the leader’s job, not theirs, and they fail to develop their own crisis-management and problem-solving abilities... Ultimately even the most intrepid employees can feel demotivated when the leader is always there to 'rescue' them." [2]
So if you're a leader facing this dilemma, what can you do? How do you know when to break glass and when to let a scenario play out? There's no single solution, but there are some practices that can help you find the right balance.
Know Your Tendencies
Most leaders I've worked with tend toward one end of the spectrum or the other. Founders and other early-stage leaders often break glass without a moment's hesitation. Many new ventures are essentially ongoing exercises in glass-breaking, and that attracts a certain personality type.
There are also many leaders who resist breaking glass or find it very difficult. Their training, formative experiences and past successes have taught them to build and rely upon orderly systems. This approach lends itself well to any number of enterprises--often large-scale or highly regulated--which also attract a certain personality type.
The challenge is that companies are dynamic entities, and leaders must be able to adapt their style to suit changing circumstances. As I've written before, "the fluidity and ambiguity that foster creative problem-solving in an early stage startup will feel like chaotic dysfunction at a later point in the company’s development." [3] And the smooth-running corporate machine will run itself right into a ditch if leadership is unable to interrupt established procedures and change course when necessary.
Knowing your tendencies is insufficient on its own, but in the absence of that self-awareness you'll likely stay in your comfort zone, do what's familiar, and miss opportunities to adapt.
Regulate Your Emotions
Despite the popular conception of emotion as an impediment to rational thought, decades of neuroscience research has made it clear that it's a vital input to the reasoning process. [4] Even so, as the eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has written, and as we all know from personal experience, "uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior [and] seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion." [5]
The most relevant emotion in this context is anxiety. It's typically some form of anxiety that either drives a leader to break glass too often or prevents them from doing so when it would be useful. I'm not suggesting that you should discount or ignore your anxiety. Emotion's primary function is to alert us to potential opportunities and threats, and if we lacked the capacity for anxiety we would be in grave danger. [6]
But emotions are data, and like all data they're comprised of both signal and noise. Emotion regulation isn't suppression--that's just pretending that you're not feeling what you're feeling. In contrast, regulation involves assessing what you're feeling and putting it in perspective in order to discern the meaningful signal in the midst of all the distracting noise. In this context, this requires you to sense, comprehend, articulate and express your anxiety in ways that enable you to make a deliberate decision about whether--and how--to break glass. [7]
Learn From Every Situation
Becoming more effective at breaking glass--and knowing when not to--isn't just a matter of advance preparation. It also entails looking back at each situation in order to learn from it. You observed a potentially troubling delay, and you either intervened and disrupted established processes, or you refrained from taking action and let things play out. What happened?
You have to assess not only the benefits of your choice, but also the costs, and here it's important to take others' perspective into account. A theme in my practice is the leader who breaks glass repeatedly and achieves the desired result in a given situation, but over time their employees become demotivated or disaffected. I'm not suggesting that you should feel obligated to tread lightly and avoid giving offense. That will cause you to hesitate at moments when you should act decisively. But there are inevitably costs to breaking glass, and they're not always obvious.
Key factors in this process are a degree of rigor in your analysis, feedback from other stakeholders, and an ongoing effort to hone your intuition. Rigor isn't rigidity, and it may be sufficient to simply ensure that you have regular time for reflection in your calendar. [8] To provide a little more structure, consider keeping a decision journal to track your results. [9]
Soliciting feedback from stakeholders doesn't mean that they get to determine whether your choice was the right one. But in the absence of input from others, you're left with your own perceptions of success or failure, and we reliably deceive ourselves under certain circumstances. [10]
Any given decision to break glass or not will be an intuitive one, made on the basis of imperfect information and dependent on subtle cues, both internal and environmental. If the choice is obvious, it will usually be made by someone more junior than you who's closer to the problem. Intuition isn't some mystical quality--it's merely pattern recognition occurring on the margins of consciousness, as noted by economist and psychologist Herbert Simon:
The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. [11]
Your task is to ensure that the accuracy of your intuitive judgments improve over time, resulting in fewer false positives--when you broke glass and the costs outweighed the benefits--as well as fewer false negatives--when you failed to break glass but should have.
Footnotes
[1] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason
[5] Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, page 52 (Antonio Damasio, 1994)
[6] "It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality." (White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123, Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)
[7] The Tyranny of Feelings
[8] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
[9] Shane Parrish of Farnam Street offers a useful set of decision-making resources:
[10] When Heuristics Go Bad (On Cognitive Biases)
[11] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)
Photo by Nancy McClure.
